In 1929, Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew,
U.S./CIA war and coup propagandist, and the founder of public
relations, conducted a successful mind-manipulation experiment for the
tobacco industry. In those days there was a taboo against women smoking in public, and Bernays was hired to change that. He consulted a psychiatrist, A. A. Brill, who told him that cigarettes represented the penis and were a symbol of male power. If women could be tricked into smoking, then they would
unconsciously think they “had” their own penises and feel more
powerful. It was irrational, of course, but it worked. Bernays had, in his
words, “engineered the consent” of women through symbolic
prestidigitation. The age of the image was launched.
He did this by having a group of women hide cigarettes under their
clothes at a Big Easter parade in New York. At a signal from Bernays,
they took out and lit up what he called “torches of freedom” (based on
the Statue of Liberty).
The press had been notified in advance and dutifully photographed and reported the story. The New York Times headline for April Fool’s Day 1929 was entitled “Group of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of Freedom.”
This fake news story made cigarettes socially acceptable for women, and sales and advertising to them increased dramatically.
The institutional power structures smiled and continued on their
merry way. Women were no freer or more powerful, but they felt they
were.
A symbolic taboo was breached as women were bamboozled. Image triumphed over reality.We
have moved on from the symbol of the penis to that of the “pussy,” and
now the symbol is displayed openly as an ironic postmodern spectacle in
the form of a sea of pussyhats.
And the fake news stories continue apace; the mind manipulators labor on and are still successful.
Genitalia remain the rage. In the 1920s there was no overt talk of
the penis; the idea then was that there was an unconscious association
that could sway women to smoke. Today subtlety is gone. “Pussy” power
is out there, cutely symbolized by pink pussyhats (see image below),
promoted by a group called the Pussyhat Project that on its website
praises the Washington Post and the New York Times for
their “high quality journalism” and “integrity.” “In the midst of fake
news sites,” the Pussyhat Project claims, “we need high quality
journalism more than ever….newspapers that have integrity….[that] can
continue reporting the truth” – i.e. the Times and the Post.

By “truth” and “integrity” do the women running the site mean that
the Russians are behind Trump’s election, Iraq had weapons of mass
destruction, and there are 200 or so alternative websites that repeat
Russian propaganda, a few of the lies reported by these papers of
“integrity”? Or do the Pussyhat women have something else in mind?
Most women demonstrators who marched against Trump were no doubt well
intentioned within their limited perspective. At the call of
organizers, they were roused from their long liberal naps. Reacting to
Trump’s gross comments about “grabbing pussy” – sick words, macho
aggressive in their meaning – they donned their pink hats, made signs,
and took their newly awakened outrage to the streets. Rightly disgusted
by being verbally assaulted and afraid that their reproductive rights
and services were threatened, they pounced like tigers on their verbal
attacker. Massive, very well organized, media friendly marches and
demonstrations followed. It was a hit parade.
Yet as others have forcefully written, something is amiss here.
During the Obama years of endless wars, drone killings, the jailing of
whistleblowers, including Chelsea Manning, etc., these demonstrators
were silent and off the streets.
A large number of the women (if not the vast majority) who marched
against Donald Trump – and the recent women’s marches can only be
described as anti-Trump marches – were Hilary Clinton supporters,
whether they would describe their votes as “the lesser of two evils” or
not. Thus, opposition to Trump’s aggressive statements toward “pussy”
was implicit support for Clinton’s and Obama’s “feminism.” In other
words, it was support for a man and a woman who didn’t publicly
talk aggressively about women’s genitals, but committed misogynist and
misandrist actions by killing thousands of women (and men and children)
all over the world, and doing it with phallic shaped weapons.
Trump will probably follow suit, but that possibility was not the
impetus for the marches. The marches centered on Trump’s misogynist,
macho language, and his threats to limit women’s access to health
services – i.e. family planning and abortion.
Since the women who recently marched didn’t march against Obama and
his Secretary of State Clinton while they slaughtered foreigners
(others) and Clinton exulted at the sodomized killing of Muammar
Gaddafi, it is quite clear the focus of their anger was a sense of
personal outrage at Trump’s insulting remarks.
Where were they these last eight years?Mike Whitney recently said it perfectly.

“They were asleep. Weren’t they? Because liberals always
sleep when their man is in office, particularly if their man is a
smooth-talking cosmopolitan snake-charmer like Obama who croons about
personal freedom and democracy while unleashing the most unspeakable
violence on civilians across the Middle East and Central Asia….No one
seems to care when an articulate bi-racial mandarin kills most people of
color, but when a brash and outspoken real estate magnate takes over
the reigns of power, then ‘watch out’ because here comes the protesters,
all three million of them!”

Obviously partisan politics, self-interest, hypocrisy, and incredible
ethnocentrism are involved. Would women’s marches have occurred if
Hillary Clinton had been elected? Of course not. She would have been
applauded and regaled as the first woman president, and her
war-mongering history against women and men would have been excused and
supported into the future, just as Obama’s has been.
This is liberal war porn by default; complicity through silence.
“Hands off my pussy.” “My pussy bites back.” These are funny
repartees to Trump’s comments, but they are totally ineffectual and
harmless. Trump’s objectives are larger, as were Obama’s and
Clinton’s. Symbolic protests attract attention, but result in the
stasis of structural power arrangements, or worse. Edward Bernays’ “torches of freedom” campaign
resulted in more women smoking, more disease, and more profits for the
tobacco companies. He preyed on the gullible. What was learned?The Pussyhat Project resulted in a sea of pink
adorned women and made for colorful images. Images, Daniel Boorstin
wrote in his prescient 1960 book, The Image
, were the future. That future is now. The language of images is
everywhere, and it is tied to what Boorstin termed “pseudo-events” and
our “demand for the illusions with which we deceive ourselves.”
Symbolically wearing your genitals on your head is surely an
arresting image, but it is misplaced and duplicitous when one has not
opposed the systematic brutality of the American empire’s ravaging
around the world under Obama and Clinton.
Boorstin argued that this world of images would displace our ability
to think clearly and understand the ways we were being manipulated. An
image, he said, was “synthetic, believable, passive, vivid, simplified,
and ambiguous.” Contrived and appealing to the senses – there are no
pink pussycats as far as I know – they side-step thought and cannot,
strictly speaking, be unmasked. “An image, like any other pseudo-event,
becomes all the more interesting with our every effort to debunk it.”
The contrivance of the image and our knowledge of its ingenuity – e.g.
pussyhats – convince us that we are smart to be taken in, even when
we’re not. It’s interesting to note that the word image (Latin, imago) is related to the word imitate (Latin, imatari).
It’s as though certain images can serve as mirrors (“to mirror” being
cognate with “to imitate”) in which we can see and mimic ourselves,
“though we like to pretend we are seeing someone else.” And seeing our
images in the images, we can imitate ourselves in an endless cycle of
self-love and navel gazing. Selfie culture has triumphed. The society
of the spectacle marches on.
The focus on genital imagery is a reflection of American narcissism,
an inward gazing, while out “there,” others are being slaughtered by
our masters of war. This is the start of a pink color revolution.
Edward Bernays would be proud.